brilliant ones, too
> engineers in two or three years without
>humanities and social sciences and with fewer courses in basic
>sciences as they do now in five years. That will be probably
>efficient, as far as economic production is concerned.
>Post-secondary schools focused on technical education alone, however,
>should not be called colleges and universities; they ought to be
>called vocational schools, in the spirit of truth in advertising.
You know as well as I do that this is a form of economic coercion. The way the job market works, people with an engineering + humanities degree will make more money than people with a vocational-school engineering degree, for no other reason than inefficiency-producing stereotypes about both kinds of institutions.
>Some radical neoliberals might love to do get rid of all humanities
A sly implication that I'm in sympathy with the structural adjusters? Tisk tisk that's hardly a fair debating tactic yoshie. As I believe I have said before on LBO, I would like to see liberal arts freely available , but voluntary.
>they would probably resist the renaming that I would demand in
>the event of abolition, as "vocational schools" do not sound as
>prestigious as "colleges" and "universities."
Which has clear economic implications, see above. It's also pretty elitist. Who decides what goes into the core? I remember attending my freshman year a weekly music appreciation class where the instructor spent half of period ridiculing us for our 'unenlightened' tastes in music. We preferred any number of things, prog rock, country, rap, punk, to classical...that made us lesser beings, hicks and trogs, belly scratching yahoos, etc etc.
>Conservatives of
>secretly (rather than brazenly) elitist sorts, too, would like to
>return us to the days when working-class kids were confined to
>technical education
Slippery, slippery. We need the right to 4 years of our choosing, free of charge. No confining working class kids (adults, in fact) to anything, _including_ a core.
again:
Forcing working-class students _into_ a core, just as much as forcing them _out_ of a core, makes the elitist assumption that working class adults do not know what's good for them.
> (if they got any higher education at all),
>entirely cheated out of liberal education reserved for the power
>elite, perhaps by using the populist rhetoric of going "back to the
>basics" and serving the needs and desires of ordinary Americans as
>cheaply as possible (ordinary Americans, they presume, do not or
>should not take interest in history, literature, philosophy, etc.).
A disgusting tactic, one I disagree with, but it cynically exploits some well founded grievances, as I hope you'll recognize. For pretty obvious reasons I wouldn't support the abolition of the core in the absence of a guaranteed 4-year college education.